The Workplace Flexibility Experiment

The tepid numbers on workplace flexibility from last month suggest the ongoing and omnipresent conversation about work-life balance hasn’t accomplished much.

A controlled experiment about flexible work schedules aims to bring scientific rigor to the debate. For six months, researchers from the University of Minnesota followed hundreds of employees at a Fortune 500 IT company to see what happened when some workers were permitted to determine when and where they worked.

Their findings aren’t earth-shattering—by and large, employees who felt they had control over their work hours reported a decrease in work-life conflict—but they are important as companies consider adopting more formal programs to help employees manage their busy, stressful lives. For one, the freedom to set a flexible schedule made the daily juggle more bearable for working parents, who reported working about one hour less overall per week, without any decline in productivity or performance.

Most companies allow flexible work arrangements on an informal basis, allowing certain employees to work from home twice a week, for example. The researchers, led by sociologists Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen, make the case for coordinated efforts within companies, with widely posted policies and training for managers and workers alike.

At some workplaces, bosses value face time over flexibility.

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“We see a variety of changes that come together in the same direction—employees feeling more control over when and where they work, employees feeling more supported by their managers, employees more likely to say they have enough time with their family and less likely to say work is interfering with family,” said Kelly. Their work will be published in June in the American Sociological Review.

The six-month experiment focused on flexibility, defined as control over one’s schedule, and managers’ support of those practices. Almost 350 workers and supervisors participated in a flexibility program called STAR (“Support. Transform. Achieve. Results.”), while a similar-sized control group continued with business as usual—generally, working an average of 45 hours per week, mostly at the office and on a typical five-day schedule.

Among other findings, they observed that workers take advantage of flexibility when it’s offered. Six months in, 35% of employees with blanket approval to telecommute or change their schedules did so, compared with 17% at the outset of the study, and 21% in the control group at the beginning and end of the experiment. For STAR employees, time spent working at home nearly doubled, to 19.6 hours per week.

Employees with both child and adult caregiving responsibilities, and those with less-supportive bosses at the outset received the most benefit from the flexibility program, according to the authors’ analysis of how the program affected specific subgroups. Flexible programs also seemed to provide the most dramatic improvement in working fathers’ perception of their supervisors’ support for work-life balance—a result, the authors speculate, of managers’ assumption that mothers need more flexible workweeks than fathers do.

Overall, parents in the STAR group reported working slightly less per week during the experiment, but that reduction did not seem to come at a cost to non-parents on staff—often a concern for bosses, who worry that non-parents may feel forced to pick up others’ slack. Flexibility “did not shift burdens from parents or caregivers to others,” the authors write, though they add that the program also didn’t confer as many benefits on those workers.

Plenty of companies remain skittish about making flexible work programs widely available. Although the company in Kelly and Moen’s experiment participated in the study because executives expressed concern about staff burnout and retention, leaders at the time were not yet ready to take STAR beyond the pilot stage, the researchers say. And the project has since been discontinued because of leadership changes at the firm.

It may be that bosses don’t know whether ceding control over work will hurt their bottom line. Future papers based on the STAR experiment will examine those questions, but preliminary evidence found no differences in performance or productivity in the flexible work group compared with the control group, the authors say.

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Written and edited by The Wall Street Journal’s Management & Careers group, At Work covers life on the job, from getting ahead to managing staff to finding passion and purpose in the office. Tips, questions? email us.